


Over Encumbered

by Raiven_Raine



Series: Kill, Laugh, Love [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 76
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Gritty, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Other, Underage Drinking, Unreliable Narrator, canon-typical raider kids, mentioned non-graphic pet death, mentions of OC death(s), this is technically a war story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 12:08:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18571162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raiven_Raine/pseuds/Raiven_Raine
Summary: Draven and our three favorite raider-brats are out on a camping trip and the man decides to tell them a true ghost story.It's heavy.





	Over Encumbered

**Author's Note:**

> This story is very heavily inspired by _'The Things They Carried'_ by Tim O'Brien, the chapter _'How To Tell A True War Story'_ in particular. 
> 
> "The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about what the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human." - Tim O'Brien
> 
> \- - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
> 
> that being said...
> 
>  ***trigger warning** \- this is a rough story. i have no real idea how to tag anything in it in a proper way. but there is one instance of mentioned, non-graphic, pet death as well as the death and mutilation of dead canon game-fodder mongrel dogs after death.

  
  
  
  
  
****

###  ****

\- - - - - How To Tell A True Ghost Story - - - - -

  
  
“My rock!” Oliver shrieked in a high-pitched note loud enough to make even a deathclaw cringe and flee. 

Isaia glared over the top of a comic he’d been reading, “it’s a rock. Get another one.”

“No!” His eyes glistened as he frantically searched the firelit campsite, “it’s special… I can’t ever get another one…”

HK shook his head at the boy, “there’s a billion out here. The world is made of ‘em.”

The little kid got more upset as he searched and came up with nothing. He started to toss things around and that’s about the time Draven cared about the situation.

“Hey, knock it the fuck off!” He grabbed the kid’s arm and pulled him away from the clean-water pot he was about to upend.

“I lost my rock,” he sniffled, trying desperately to hide how upset he was and failing miserably.

HK pointed his knife at the boy, “it’s useless and just weighs you down.”

Oliver glowered at him, “how would you like it if you lost your dumb knife?”

“That’s not the same,” HK smiled at his weapon, “this is actually useful.”

“You can get another,” the little boy said mockingly.

“Not like this one,” HK frowned and cradled the weapon lovingly like a small pet. 

HK’s knife was old - a pre-war Ka-Bar. It’d be tough to get ahold of another one like it, since they were highly coveted, but that’s not what made it special. The thing had some knicks in the blade and had been resharpened by the boy habitually over a hundred times, probably. Draven had given the boy that knife. It hadn’t been as special to him, but it was to the kid. 

Draven pulled Ollie closer to himself to make him sit the fuck down and stop razing the campsite. “We’ll find it in the daylight, okay?”

“But I need it to sleep,” he said quietly. 

Isaia snorted and shook his head as he turned the page of his comic. 

“Shut up,” Draven pointed a finger at the oldest boy, “you read that comic every single night. The same one.”

He shrugged, “relaxes my brain. You drink every single night, so shut up.”

“Not every night,” the man grumbled. 

Oliver fidgeted with his hands where the rock would usually have taken up the space. 

Draven put an arm around the youngest boy to comfort him, “your rock is important.” He pointed to the other boys in turn, “just like your knife and your comic.”

Isaia cocked an eyebrow, “and your drink.”

“Actually…” Draven pulled a silver ball-chain necklace around his neck from under his shirt, “this is what I carry.” 

The boys looked at him and HK pointed, “that’s just a chain you always wear.”

The man nodded and tucked it back under his shirt. “I carry this… And a lot of things you can’t see.”

“What’s that mean?” Ollie sniffled and wiped the snot from his face. 

“It means your rock is important.”

HK cocked his head to the side in thought, “where’d you get it? The chain?”

Draven grinned, “same place you got something you carry… Your name.”

Isaia folded his comic and got comfortable against a tree stump, “you’re gunna tell us a story, ain’t you?”

“Well I was, but not if you’re gunna be a shit about it.”

“I wanna hear it,” HK moved closer with interest.

Isaia snorted, “of course you do, it’s about you, apparently.”

“It’s about _me,”_ Draven pressed a hand to his chest. “... And _all_ of us.” He thought for a moment, “it’s also a ghost story.”

Ollie looked scared, but tried to hide it, “ghosts are cool.”

Isaia rolled his eyes, “there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“Ghosts are very real,” Draven pointed at the boy then shook his head at Oliver, “and they’re _not_ cool.”  
  
****

###  ****

\- - - - - - - - - -

  
  
Being stuck in a small vault community for the better part of your young life often lends to some pretty strange games. You gotta find your fun where you can. Kevin Wilson stole my yo-yo. I knew he’d done it, but I let him because this was the start of a fun game. A couple days later I snuck into his room to steal it back, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I took his stupid teddy bear. 

If you woulda ever asked him, he never owned a dumb stuffed animal, but everyone knew that old ratty bear was his. He slept with it every night. Everyone knew everything about everyone. If your shit was a different color one morning after eating too many altered greens, everyone would know and be talking about it because living in the little community was boring as fuck. 

So I had his dumb bear, someone else must have lifted my yo-yo off Kevin, and now the fun started. I’d made up little notes. Clues. I had painstakingly cut up several newspapers, magazines, and any worded papers I could get my grubby hands on. This got me in trouble later, but it was all worth it. My project took a couple days and an entire bottle of adhesive - another thing I got in trouble for. Once you stick something to the walls with that shit, there’s no getting it off. All these years later and I’m sure there’s still a paper glued to the door that used to be his that reads - _‘if u ever want 2 see Teddy alive again…’_

Sometimes the memory will strike me out of the blue and I’ll laugh thinking about who’ll come to the vault a hundred years after we’d all died or left. They’d find my faded cryptic messages plastered all over the walls, floors, ceilings… They’d think they’re about to discover something profound or some treasure, but really, it was just teenagers being bored. There’s nobody for them to rescue. No gold at the end of the rainbow. Just memories I carry.

Anyway, Kev was pissed. We all trailed behind him, giggling the entire time like the little fucking jackasses we were, as he followed clues to his kidnapped bear. He blamed Davey, at first, which was a part of the game where we’d try to ferret out who stole the thing so we could be sure to kick the correct ass. But Kevin blamed him in such a way that had the two of them fighting in Davey’s room; Kevin’s hands on a comic threatening to rip it to pieces as Dave pled with him not to. The two boys ended up fighting over the comic and it got ripped up anyway. 

We all stopped giggling at that point. The look on Davey’s face as his favorite comic was torn in half was gut-wrenching. I felt that right in my chest like I’d been kicked. The games were fun - up until someone got hurt real bad. This… This hurt real bad. He cried. Eighteen years old and he was on his knees crying like a toddler. I felt that, too. 

I could never, ever, tell them that it’d been me who’d kidnapped the bear, though I’m sure they figured it out on their own later through the process of elimination. It was my fault Davey’s comic had been destroyed, but nothing could be done for it, so I didn’t speak up. 

The rest of the game wasn’t as fun anymore. Kevin found his bear right where I’d tied it up to a chair with duct tape over its mouth. Relief flooded his eyes as he hugged the bear, then he tried to pretend like it wasn’t important. 

It was important. 

That bear was just as important to him as Davey’s comic had been to Davey. As important as my yo-yo was to me. These things we all carried were important sure as the blood in our veins. 

Susan Taylor carried a red ribbon that she wore around her slender neck or up in her mouse-brown curls. It’d been her mother’s. She made sure to remind us of that fact every time anyone breathed in her general direction. The girl’s mother died when Susie was younger, but she still spoke about the woman constantly. Sometimes the things she said sounded like she believed that her ma had simply gone away for a while and would be back any day. I don’t think Susie was all there in the head sometimes. 

Daniel Baker carried a pocket knife - as if he would ever need the thing where we lived. But he never used it and wouldn’t let anyone else use it, either. “It’s not for cutting things,” he’d always say. Why carry the thing if you’re not going to use it? Because it was important to him for other reasons he never told anyone about. This knife was off limits to our thief game and we all respected that. Mostly because we were all pretty sure if we didn’t respect it, the boy would actually make use of it for once and stab us to death with the thing. 

Danny’s older sister Julie didn’t carry anything. Nothing we could see anyway. Nothing more than a diary that never said anything interesting. Jules liked to stash things, though. She was the best at the thief game - if she ever stole something, that thing would never be found nine times out of ten. We didn’t like her playing Thief for obvious reasons. 

Pretty sure she was the one who stole my yo-yo because I never did find it. I needed that thing. I’d play with it idly as I daydreamed and thought about things. Tossing a ball against the wall wasn’t the same, and that ball was taken pretty quick when it started driving people insane as it rhythmically thumped against the metallic wall of my room and echoed through the halls. 

What would we take with us once we left the community? The vault we lived in would be opening soon and the older teens would be setting out to explore the new land. There’d be some adults with us, of course, and the things they carried would be more practical… Probably.

First aid kits, food, weapons, lighters and matches, water-purification tabs, socks… You know, important shit. 

Steve Bennett thought a canteen would be important - but not for water. Vodka was something important to him. That man and Kenneth had a few ‘discussions’ about bringing things we didn’t need, but Kenneth had stuffed a bible and several letters from his wife, each sealed with a kiss, into his own bag. 

“They don’t weigh as much and they’re more important than the two bottles of alcohol you’re carrying,” he told Steve.

“You have that bible and those letters memorized,” came the reply. 

Us kids didn’t see why any of those things were important and we never saw the hypocrisy of stuffing our own bags with comics, nick-knacks, framed pictures, toys, and candy. 

We needed them, sure as the blood in our veins. 

And, of course, we would all be picking up more things to carry along the way. Heavy shit that weighed us down more than the crap we had in our packs.

Along with the bible and love letters, Kenny also carried with him the responsibility of leadership. He’d been teaching those of us who were leaving all about survival for the past two years. He’d been in the War. He knew what was what. You can probably imagine our surprise when this man was the first to get killed. 

There was a strange excitement and fear mixed together with leaving the vault. We never talked about it. Well, we didn’t talk about the fear, anyway. We all had it, though. Our parents and everyone kept telling us how cool it’d be, but dangerous. Of course it’d be dangerous! They never really said how, other than basic wilderness survival. 

They were proud of us. In their time they had a bunch of different ‘coming of age’ stories to tell and this was ours. Can you really be a man or woman if you aren’t forged by some fire? 

So why’d we have to leave? Forging ahead, scientific research, see what the world is like, homestead, become an adult - shit like that. We watched old movies about life before the War, then they’d tell us it won’t look like that. What a waste of time. They showed us all manner of War recruitment videos, too. It was our duty to go out in the war-ravaged lands and it was an honor to serve the country. They made it sound like we’d join up with other vault people and unite in some glory-fueled march into the future to reclaim society. Also a waste of time. They should have been showing us horror stories full of monsters and killer psychos. 

Us kids talked about that shit. 

“What do you think it’ll be like?” Henry always asked the same thing. Maybe he was looking for an answer nobody was giving him. Maybe he was afraid and wanted to prepare for the worst. Perhaps he was trying to talk himself out of going at all. 

“An alien planet,” Jakob would always shrug in reply… Then go into strange imaginary details. Funny how his reply had been the most accurate - aliens and all.

Jules, always a buzzkill, would go into details about how terrible other people would be. She didn’t believe that folks would be friendly out there. She was right, of course, but it still terrified the shit out of us more than anything else ever did. We couldn’t comprehend monsters we’d never seen before, but we could sure as shit comprehend the monsters people could be. We had a few of them in our vault, after all.

One day, Julie took some of us aside for a secret. 

Carl Powell had died that morning and she wanted to see the body. We always incinerated bodies, but sometimes it took a day or two before it was done. Carl’s body was going to take a bit longer because people were already whispering that he’d been murdered and they wanted to be sure. Maybe he was. Or maybe people were just making up stories to tell out of boredom. Who would ever murder one of their own?

Dale Powell was jealous. He wanted Laurie and couldn’t have her because that was his brother’s wife. He wanted her and she refused. Several times. Years of this. So he murdered his brother and made it look like suicide, which was much more common, so he could have her. That was the story going around before his body was even cold - fact or not.

Jules was the best thief, like I said. She could steal the glasses right off someone’s face. She had all the right keycards to get into the boiler room -- So down we went. 

Me, Henry, Jakob, Danny, and Julie. 

I have to take a moment to mention that this happened a week before we were all set to leave the vault. I was already pissing myself about what was out there and I was standing on the edge of bravery and maybe injuring myself so I could stay safe in the vault. Something small, maybe break a leg. That’s how scared I was - willing to break my own fucking leg in order to stay safe in the stupid vault I hated so much because it was boring and led to regular suicides. 

There’s a very thin line between bravery and stupidity and sometimes it’s tough to tell what side of that line you’re standing on. 

I wanna say Carl looked just like he was peacefully asleep, but he didn’t. That’s what they always told us about death - you just peacefully go to sleep and don’t wake up. Bullshit. Maybe it was that way after someone fell asleep in their bed and woke up dead an hour later, but Carl was definitely not asleep and it looked anything but peaceful.

Something I carry with me, still today, is how his face looked. I’ve seen several dead bodies since then in various stages, killed different ways, but this one -- This thing I carry is heavier than all those other bodies. 

We stood there staring at it for several minutes. Felt like hours. We stood there in that room, taking in the stink of the body and all the shit and piss dried to his pants, soaking in the sight and smell of it until it permeated our skin and brains and hair and entire being and there is not enough water in all the world to wash that off.

None of us said a word until Julie whispered, “is that what we’re gunna look like?”

Nobody answered. We didn’t talk about it ever again. 

But we sure as shit thought about it. I thought more about breaking my leg. I even tried to once, but my stupid brain and self-preservation wouldn’t let me. Then I thought that maybe I just wasn’t scared enough - If I were really scared of leaving the vault, I would surely be able to break my own leg. I thought about asking for help with the task, but no way I could do that. The fear of being a chickenshit outweighed my fear of leaving. Maybe it did for the other kids, too, because we all walked out of there on perfectly working legs. 

Later on, I would be comforted by the thought of that body. We’re all going to die anyway. Do I really want to end up looking like Carl, found in his room with a rope around his neck, or would it be better to be found out in the wasteland full of bullets or torn into bits from alien beasts? In a weird way, it was like choosing how I want to die and having some sort of power over it. Picking my poison. 

That’s what I like to tell myself anyway.  
  
****

###  ****

\- - - - - - - - - -

  
  
HK was staring wide-eyed at Draven, thoroughly interested in the plot of tonight’s bedtime story. Isaia pretended to be not-so-interested… But he was. 

When the man fell silent to think about some shit, Ollie spoke up, “thought the story was about ghosts and us, too?”

Draven shrugged as he fished a bottle from his pack, “it is.”

“We’ve all seen dead bodies before,” Isaia pointed at the man, “and they ain’t scary and they ain’t ghosts.”

“That’s how you were raised,” the man said then paused to take a large swig, “and the dead body doesn’t matter. That didn’t even happen.”

HK let out an irritated huff and crossed his arms, “why’d you lie?”

“I didn’t. I said it didn’t happen, that doesn’t mean what I told you was a lie.”

The boys rolled their eyes in unison and Draven could swear he heard it like a wet chorus of utter annoyance.

“Tell us the truth,” Ollie frowned.

“Does it matter?”

Isaia nodded, “yeah. What’s the point of tellin' a story if you lie?”

“Carl died. We talked about it. I imagined what he must look like. I was afraid, and looking at his body there in the boiler room was a real thing I imagined. It had the same impact on me as anything factual I can touch. I still see his face sometimes and I still felt all those things.” Draven stared at the bottle in his hand for a moment then snorted a little laugh, “wouldn’t be much of a story if I just said I’d spent my days bored in a vault being afraid to leave.”

HK shrugged, “so tell us something that actually happened.”

“I’m telling you things that happened,” Draven pointed the mouth of his bottle at the boy, “you just want some cold facts or do you want a story?”

“We want the story to be true,” Isaia cocked his chin.

“You shits weren’t this demanding of stories like Huckleberry Finn. You read that and didn’t get all pissy about it being factual.”

Oliver shrugged, “that was a normal storybook, though.”

Draven blinked stupidly at the boy. “So, if I wrote all this down and gave it to you as a book, that’d make it different?”

They had nothing to say about that so the man continued, “Davey was the first of us kids to get killed.” He flashed a smirk at Isaia, “the end.”

HK made a face, “okay… We get it. How’d he die?” Before Draven could say some smart-ass remark, he corrected, “what’s the story?”  
  
****

###  ****

\- - - - - - - - - -

  
  
The adults had died, from real dumb shit, and the only people who remained were us kids. Though, by this time we were all adults because of the crap we’d been through. It hadn’t even been half a year. I was seventeen but aged about ten years. An adult, but still a child with balls three times the size they should have been.

I’d learned a lot in that short amount of time. Picked up many new things to carry around with me. A fear of deathclaws was one of them. After watching our first fearless leader, Kenneth, get torn in half by one, his ghost made a permanent home in my dreams and wouldn’t allow me to get much sleep. 

Ghosts like to gift people with nightmares and insomnia, which are two more really heavy items and really shitty gifts. Kinda like a white elephant, but if the elephant were a zombie and hell-bent on your destruction.

So it was me, Julie, Jakob, Henry, David, Susie, Daniel, and Kevin. 

Susan was the youngest in our group, but it had been her, surprisingly, who pilfered the hooch from Steve’s pack after he died. He didn’t need it anymore. She even found a bonus bottle in there. Maybe it was because the girl had spent half her life dealing with the loss of her ma, but Susie’s balls were bigger than all of ours combined. 

Steve died taking a shit. He was drunk, dealing with what’d happened to Kenny a couple weeks or days before, and I don’t think he ever even saw it coming. 

Or maybe he did, but he was definitely dead when the mongrel dogs started eating him. We knew because he’d stopped screaming. He never really screamed too much, anyway, but those sounds he made turned into the sounds ghosts make as they ride around on our shoulders. A yelp of surprise, strangled half scream, moment of struggle, then just dogfood. 

One minute he was taking a drunken shit, the next he was kibble. 

All that - and it never stopped us from drinking the same poison that got that man killed. The first time I drank, it’d been too much. I ended up puking my guts out all over the floor of some house we’d been staying in. And I tried to mourn the loss of Steve like I’d done with Kenny, but all I could feel was my head spinning, burning projectile vomit, and this selfishness that I was happy to be feeling like utter shit. I was still alive to be getting sick. 

I remember a time or two my dad drank too much back in the vault at some holiday celebrations. The next day he’d have one hell of a hangover and he’d roll in his bed, hiding under blankets from the bright lights, bitching about wishing he were dead. Pleading with someone to put him out of his misery. He had no fucking idea.

Danny paced the floors of that house, looking out the windows constantly. He’d mutter every now and then about dogfood. Sometimes he’d laugh quietly with his sister, “he thought he knew shit, he didn’t know shit, and right about now he’s becoming shit.” 

“Knock it off,” Jakob would repeat, “Steve was our friend.”

Jules nodded, “now he’s a pile of-”

“Shut the fuck up!” Susie shouted and threw a bottle at the other girl. It shattered against the wall and startled us all into a silent stupor. The girl had never used bad language before then and I’m not sure if what she said was more shocking or the bottle shattering, but after that, she threw more bottles and more cuss words into nearly every sentence she said up until she died.

And it wasn’t that we disliked Steve or anything - we joked to keep from freaking out or crying or tucking tail and running back to the vault. 

We all wanted to go back, but nobody said that. I dreamt about it. Running back to mommy and daddy to cry all about how awful the wasteland was. Sealing the vault door behind me and living the rest of my life hidden in there with all that steel keeping me safe from deathclaws and mongrels and ghosts. 

But then sometimes my dreams would go further. Me as an older man found dead in my room with a rope around my neck. Laying half naked and bloated next to the boiler while some other little brats poked at my body wondering if that’s what they’ll look like. 

Sometimes my dreams would end with me as a very old man… And that’s it. Just a seventy-year-old coot sitting in a chair, shaking a wrinkly fist and telling all the kids to get off my astroturf. And that was the most terrifying thought of all. 

So I took up a bottle to try and drown those thoughts. Funny thing is - they can swim.

Davey didn’t know that. Every new place we came to, he’d immediately hit up a bar to scrounge. Nobody questioned it. Hell, most of the time we had the same thoughts in mind. It became habit. Sometimes Davey, or me or Susie, would covet an extra bottle all to ourselves. We added them to our heavy packs and carried them to the next town where we’d get more. 

We’d come up on some mongrel dogs one evening. They were mostly napping or playing or eating or whatever the fuck dogs do in their downtime. Sitting around discussing the complexities of the universe, no doubt. There were a couple puppies. There was some sort of beauty in their furless gnarled skin. The way their teeth glistened outside of lipless permanent grins. The depth of their red and black eyes. The way they looked like a dead rotted thing and a living thing at the same time. I wanted one. I wanted to take this creature and raise it to be better than a vicious beast. Surely it could be better and maybe even useful. I could teach it tricks. Mostly to entertain myself, but maybe to alert to danger, too. Perhaps it could fetch me a beer or sniff out some good dope.

We killed all those dogs. Davey, Jules, and Daniel threw a couple grenades, then finished up with a spray of bullets as if ammo grew on trees. Then they went down to stab the lifeless bodies into pulp. Over and over again. Angrily. They stabbed until they were weak and sore from doing it, then they stabbed some more and started cutting the dead dogs up into chunks. They stabbed out eyeballs and cut out tongues, cut paws and tails off. 

Jakob and Susie cried, but they did it, too. I probably cried, but I don’t really remember. All I remember is being covered in blood and finding one pup left alive. I stared at it. The pitiful welp stared back. I should have killed it, but I didn’t. I took the trembling thing and put it in my backpack. I carried it with me for a couple few days. I fed it some of my rations and tried to teach it tricks. 

How great would it be to see this horrifying mongrel dog as an adult rolling over and playing dead? This weird zombie-dog of the new world became something I could focus on while I ignored other shit. He’d become some strange symbol of something I was afraid of, bent to my will and forced to perform some amusing tricks for me. I named it Fluffy, even though it was anything but. I was never very good at naming things. The beast pawed at me like any dog does, so the first thing I taught him was to high five. He almost had it down...

That is, until Davey threw my puppy onto a mine. I was so angry. In tears as my thing was taken from me. I didn’t feel bad any longer that it was my fault his comic got destroyed. I told him so as we fought. 

“It was my fault and I’m glad! I’ll fuck up all your shit!” 

He got more pissed and we started throwing drunken punches rather than just shoving each other back and forth. Henry and Jakob tried to break us up, I remember. 

And I remember the look on his face when I shoved him back onto a landmine. 

The thing clicked and Davey froze. His face fell flat. And then he was gone. 

And I’ll never forget those last words I’d yelled at him. 

We’d all learned a very hard lesson that day. Several lessons, actually. Some of them stuck better than others. 

I lined up all the bottles we had and smashed them with sticks and rocks. I threw some against walls. I swore I’d never drink ever again. I would never say an unkind word to any of my friends ever again. I wouldn’t get into stupid arguments and fights. And I sure as shit would never get another pet or love another thing. No more letting myself get attached to objects, animals, or people. 

And I was definitely not going to have kids of my own. Bringing a child into this fucked up world seemed like a certain cruelty I knew I would never be able to bear.  
  
****

###  ****

\- - - - - - - - - -

  
  
Isaia wrinkled his nose and pointed, “but you did all those things again, anyway.”

Draven shrugged, “obviously the lessons didn’t take hold the right way. Or maybe they did. Maybe there wasn’t even any lessons to be had or any morals to the shit I’ve done in my life and said here tonight.”

HK scratched his head, “isn’t the moral about drinking too much and not letting yourself get close to people?”

“I think it’s about not breaking people’s stuff,” Oliver shrugged then looked to the man beside him, “right?”

“Could be,” Draven snorted a laugh, “who knows… I mostly just talk out of my ass.”

The oldest boy narrowed his eyes slightly, “wait a minute… Was all that shit just made up?”

“Some of it,” Draven shrugged and took a drink. “But it’s all the truth.”

Ollie smiled, “good, cuz it was kinda sad. I’m glad your puppy didn’t really die.”

“No… The puppy actually did die. Not like that… But it died.” 

Isaia frowned, “how did it die? What parts actually happened?”

“All of them happened.” Draven wondered how long it would take for this shit to sink into their thick skulls. 

HK was quicker than the other two. “Are you gunna tell us the story about your chain? You said you were gunna tell us. And about my name.”

“I never said I was going to tell you that.” 

HK glared. 

Oliver got to his knees on the log they were sitting on and leaned close, “please tell us.” 

Draven took another drink as he hesitated. 

“Please?” HK tried out the foreign word. 

“I’m working on it…” The man sighed. He pulled the chain from under his shirt and ran his thumb and forefinger over the metal balls one by one. “This chain weighs a lot. Almost as much as this bottle,” he held the whiskey up, “or as much as dead puppies, friends and lovers, fear, responsibility, and ghosts.”  
  
****

###  ****

\- - - - - - - - - -

  
  
One by one, the other kids died. Well, except for Jules. I actually have no idea what happened to her or if she’s still alive, but that’s a story for some other night. I’ve told you already what happened to Jakob… And Henry. Sort of. 

After Jakob died, I lost my mind for a while. He was too good for the new world and too good to have died the way he did -- Tricked by some assholes who wanted his stuff.

These shitheads were just like us. I’m sure they played dumb thief games of sorts in their vault, got in fights, laughed, drank, cried, lost friends and family and were afraid… Maybe one of them tried to have a puppy that their friend drunkenly shot in the face one day because he was sick of looking at the ugly thing and just wanted to hurt something like how he was hurt inside. Maybe they daydreamed about throwing said friend on a landmine out of retribution, then felt really shitty about those thoughts when that friend actually died of a stab wound he’d stupidly done to himself on accident. You know, hypothetically speaking. 

I thought I was starting to get the hang of things in the new world. Thought we had it down and the three of us remaining would do okay. Maybe people have always had to deal with this shit. Maybe my grandparents thought they had life figured out as adults out in the world, then were thrown for a loop when some crazy new thing happened. 

My grampa most likely got a handle on walking and talking, then he fell out of a tree, broke his arm, and cussed at gravity. Thought he had dating all figured out when he got a girlfriend and got laid for the first time… Until she got pregnant and a new baby hit him right upside the head with a dose of reality and new life. Then he got that sorted out. How to change diapers, feed the kid, keep it alive, teach it how to talk and walk… 

And, maybe, he figured he had shit down pat right up to the point he was tossed into a war. There’s an entirely different life for you. Nobody goes into war or life knowing what they’re doing. Some might think they know or pretend to know - but they have no fucking clue. 

The wasteland is a war, just as having kids is a war and life, in general, is war. Learning about yourself, others, life, responsibility… 

Getting off topic. 

So, I’d lost my fucking mind, right, and I was pissed off about Jakob dying. I was drinking that night, trying, again, to drown thoughts and failing miserably. The more I drank, the more pissed off I got. How dare those assholes take my friend from me!

I don’t talk about Henry too much, but he was my best friend. All my life. He and I were pretty much inseparable in the vault… And outside of it. Funny how it came down to him and me in the end. He was pretty level headed and smart. Clever. He’d done a few dumb things, of course, but he learned from them, unlike my stupid ass.

I wanted to make those assholes pay for what they’d done to Jake. Make them pay for taking my thing from me. I wanted to hurt them in the way I was hurt. Henry tried to talk me out of it at first. Maybe he wasn’t as drunk as I was - he dealt with shit differently. 

Henry carried a rosary. Sort of. He started out with a proper one, anyway, but lost it at some point, so he picked up a length of chain and used it just the same. He’d turn it over and over in his fingers, counting the links and rubbing the cold metal until it warmed from his hands as he thought about whatever. Some nights he’d turn it over in his hands for hours. He told me once that he liked to let the chain soak up his heat and his thoughts, then he could tuck it away for a while and feel better for a time. I laughed at that idea at first, but later found merit in it. 

Every link of the chain held a memory. He gave his thoughts and problems to this object, then carried it around with him so he’d never forget, but the problems weren't exactly his any longer. The chain carried an overabundance of weight and Henry said he would throw it into the wasteland and get a clean one someday. But he never did. He couldn’t let it go. 

He ended up coming with me that night. Even though he’d been trying to talk me out of it and kept saying nothing will bring Jake back. He said all those things friends say when they’re trying to get you to not do a stupid thing. But, also, like the friend he was, he came along with me and he helped me kill those people. 

They were all asleep. Five of them. I wanted to wake them up and have a proper fight. I wanted them to be awake and aware when I hurt them. But I was also terrified that they’d kill me all the same. So I never woke them from their drunken slumber. Maybe they were already in pain from killing Jake. Good. 

I can’t remember what went through my mind at the start of it all other than gallons of adrenaline, but I had suddenly realized what I was doing after slitting the second throat. 

The guy was laying next to a woman in such a way that it was clear they were most likely lovers. His death caused her to wake up before I could get to her and she started screaming and crying hysterically. I just stared at her for the longest time and then tried to soothe her. I tried to fucking calm her down as if I wasn’t covered in the blood of her lover and friends. 

Henry tried to help. He told her to stop wailing, rubbed her back for a moment, then started yelling at her. I tried to cover her mouth to get her to stop… The sounds she made started to make me panic. There was nobody left alive to wake up or anything, but I couldn’t handle those wailing sounds she was making. They were worse than anything. Worse than the sound of Kenny being ripped in half by that deathclaw and worse than the dogs killing and eating Steve. They were worse because they were being caused by me. My fault. I did this. I made these sounds happen. I did the stupid thing Henry had tried to save me from doing. 

And he saved me from myself again when he killed that woman and took me back to our place. I don’t even remember walking back, but I remember sitting in a broken shower basin with him, both of us covered in sticky flaking blood, as he held me tightly and I cried until I couldn’t cry any longer.

All the weight of everything I had been carrying so far had finally smashed me down and broke me and now Henry was carrying me through it all. He carried me for days as I stumbled around numbly, trying to work up the courage to kill myself or go home or go kill more people. Whatever I thought would make it better. I drank, I used up all the chems we’d been finding, I started doing dangerous shit… Sometimes I would just go wander the wasteland in nothing but my tighty-whiteys, taunting death. 

Henry would bring me back in. We’d play mindless card games, he’d make supper at regularly scheduled times every single night, we worked on fixing up the house… All those things. We talked about getting another puppy, though the thought hurt, the talk of future activities helped. We got a cat. I named it Killer. Again, not the best at naming things. 

We celebrated holidays as best we could because Henry said it was important. For my birthday… He gave me this chain I wear. Pretty sure it came from a metal bead curtain or some plumbing chain… But he put it around my neck like it was the finest gold or silver fancy-ass diamond jewelry. And... It was much more valuable than the finest pre-war jewelry. I took right to using it as a strange rosary just as he did with his chain-links.

We talked more about the future until I started feeling better. We talked about having kids one day. I mean, not the two of us for obvious reasons, but kids of our own with some women that we’d not met yet. So we talked about those women that we would one day meet and how great it’ll be and one night I drunkenly promised to name my firstborn after him. 

“What if you have a girl?”

“Then she better get used to the name Henry.”

“What if your woman hates the name?”

“Then she better get used to the name Henry!” I laughed. 

It felt so good to be able to laugh again. And love again. Even if I was in love with the idea of a future I knew would never happen and it terrified me before, it became something nice to think about.

And we also spoke about going back to the vault. He wanted to go back. Sometimes he’d mention it and us kids would wave him off and laugh at him for being a pansy-ass… I wanted to go back, too, but I still waved him off and talked him out of the very idea. Of all the reasons I gave him to not go back, the one reason I didn’t tell him was the biggest - I could never go back to that life, those people, and my parents after all the shit I’d done. 

Maybe he’d still be alive if I hadn’t worked so hard to talk him out of going back. Maybe if I told him my biggest fears, he would have comforted me through it and opened my eyes to the fact that I was afraid for the wrong reasons. Going back wouldn’t have been so bad. Not even after all the shit we’d been through and done. Growing old together in the vault wouldn’t have been so scary, perhaps, because we’d have had each other and maybe he could have told me so if I would have just spoken up. 

Or, maybe, he allowed me to talk him out of going back because he was afraid, too. Another thing Henry carried everywhere he went was his father’s suicide from years before and he was pretty sure his ma would be another in his absence. He didn’t want to go back to the vault and find that out, take the blame for leaving her alone, then maybe end up the same.

No sense on dwelling on what could have been, though… It is what it is.  
  
****

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The boys were quiet for once in their lives. HK turned his knife over and over in his hands, Isaia trailed his fingertips through the dirt next to him, making abstract lines. Oliver’s hands fidgeted where his rock would have been. 

And Draven idly ran a finger along his chain as he nodded to himself, “so there’s a ghost story for you.”

HK sheathed his knife, “did you tell us all that for a reason? Like… Because me and Isaia are gunna be going out on our rite soon?”

Draven shrugged and took a drink. 

“I don’t want you to go without me,” Ollie said to the older boys. 

What he probably meant was that he didn’t want to be left behind and have to go do his rite alone when he reached the age. He meant to say he was scared, but he’d never say it. None of them would. 

Leaving the vaults had become some tradition that most raiders kept in their lives out in the wasteland over the years. Leave the camp community as a teen and come back a man or woman… Balls bigger than they should be. Raider kids grew up three times faster than vault kids ever did, however, so they did their own rites anywhere between the ages of fourteen to eighteen. Draven thought it was kind of crazy at first… But looking at these three boys with him - they weren’t kids. They never were. It was easy to forget sometimes. 

Especially when he looked at his own blood son. Most raider men didn’t know which kids were theirs so they treated them all as their own, but Draven knew which little shithead was his spawn. 

HK climbed into his bedroll and smirked, “well, I ain’t scared and I’m not gunna drink myself into dumb decisions.” He smiled at Ollie, “and you’re coming with us, whether you like it or not, cuz you’re our brother whether _we_ like it or not.” 

Isaia nodded agreement then shrugged, “we can wait a couple more years… No big.” 

“Or a bunch of years?” Ollie gave a weary lopsided grin. “I don’t know if I’m ready… Yet…” He quietly admitted. 

“Didn’t you hear?” HK motioned to Draven, “nobody’s ever ready, but they do shit anyway.”

The man snorted a loud laugh, “there’s a solid truth for you.”

Isaia crawled into his own bedroll and folded up his jacket as a pillow, “was that the moral?”

“Maybe. Or maybe there’s no point,” Draven helped Ollie into his bed, “maybe I just wanted to think out loud for a while.”

“You tell a lotta stories like that,” HK said as he adjusted himself for comfort, “why do you tell war stories then get sad about it and say there’s no sense dwelling on the past… But--”

“It was a love story,” Draven pointed at him, “and a life story. Ghost story. The wasteland, and life in general, is full of mystery and fear, love and heartache, loss, fun, beauty, friends, silly games and longing…” He trailed off then changed the subject, “I tell these stories to ease some of the silent burdens I carry. It helps to put it to words and get it out. We tell stories to save our lives.”

Oliver nodded sagely as if he understood, “sometimes, when I did something to someone else and I don’t wanna say it, but I feel bad, I make up a story.”

Isaia snorted, “yeah you do, but you need to work on it cuz your stories are always insane and have aliens and goblins.”

Ollie frowned at the boy, “better than your stories cuz you don’t even have any.”

“Okay, brats,” Draven rolled his eyes, “you can have a fantasy-driven dick-waving contest tomorrow.” He smiled at them… On the inside. Outside he wore a stern mask that none of them believed for a minute. 

Those boys all carried things around with them. Stories. Far too many for children to ever be carrying around. 

Draven smiled, for real, at HK when he saw the kid make a subtle movement inside the bedroll as his hand went to his pocket.

“Goddammit, Ollie!” HK pulled a rock out and half tossed, half threw it at the little boy, “your dumb rock was in my bed.”

Oliver squealed in delight, then wiped the look off his face and tried to pretend it didn’t matter -- But his little hands went right to rubbing the smooth stone for comfort as he laid down and closed his eyes. 

Good - One less thing HK would have to carry… And the thievery of that rock would have weighed a ton.  
  
  
  
  
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End file.
